Four men jailed over brutal homophobic murder in Spain

 

Four men jailed over brutal homophobic murder in Spain

 

Men kicked and punched Samuel Luiz, 24, to death outside nightclub in A Coruña in 2021

 

Sam Jones in Madrid

Wed 8 Jan 2025 18.55 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/08/four-men-jailed-for-2021-homophobic-in-spain

 

Four men have been jailed over the homophobic murder of a young gay man whose killing almost four years ago shocked Spain and led to nationwide protests.

 

Samuel Luiz, a 24-year-old nursing assistant, was out with friends in the Galician city of A Coruña in the early hours of Saturday 3 July 2021 when an argument started outside a nightclub.

 

Luiz’s friends said he had stepped out of the club to make a video call when two passersby accused him of trying to film them on his phone. Luiz explained he was talking to a friend by video, but he was attacked by one of the passersby and left with a badly bruised face.

 

Five minutes later, the assailant returned with others who kicked and punched Luiz until he lost consciousness. He was taken to hospital, where he died the same morning.

 

In November last year, a jury found the four men guilty of Luiz’s murder at the end of a trial in A Coruña.

 

On Wednesday, a court in the city sentenced three of the convicted men – Diego Montaña, Alejandro Freire and Kaio Amaral – to terms of 24 years, 20 years, and 20 years and six months for their respective roles in the murder. A fourth man, Alejandro Míguez, who did not hit Luiz, was given a 10-year sentence for being an accomplice to murder.

 

In her sentencing remarks, the presiding judge, Elena Fernanda Pastor Novo, noted the severity of the crime and the pain it had caused Luiz’s family, who had experienced “significant psychological suffering beyond the pain inherent in the loss of a son and a brother”.

 

Montaña, the judge added, had shown “an absolute lack of empathy and a cruelty that warrant a more severe sentence”. She also took into account the behaviour of the killers immediately after the attack and the fact that Luiz had been left “unconscious and with a bloody face in the middle of a roundabout”.

 

The judge referred to the fact that Montaña had threatened Luiz using homophobic language, saying: “Stop filming, or I’ll kill you, faggot.” Montaña’s animosity towards Luiz because of his sexual orientation then “triggered a totally aggressive reaction against Samuel … [who was] pounced on and kicked and punched, mainly in the head and face”. A postmortem found more than 30 separate injuries.

 

The sentence, which can be appealed in Galicia’s high court, also ordered the killers to pay Luiz’s family compensation of €303,000 (£253,000).

 

The attack prompted revulsion across Spain and led to demonstrations the following week in cities including A Coruña, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Salamanca, Bilbao and Zaragoza. Demonstrators carried signs with slogans such as “your homophobia is killing us”.

 

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, denounced the killing and offered his condolences to Luiz’s friends and family. “It was a savage and merciless act,” he said. “We will not take a step backwards when it comes to rights and freedoms and Spain will not tolerate this.”